Hello and welcome to my May 2026 free software activities report. A lot's been going on in my life offline so I took a bit of a hiatus from doing these reports, but I've had a fairly productive month of May so I thought it'd be nice to do another one for this month.

GNU & FSF

• GNU Emacs:
  • ffs-0.2.2: I finally polished and published my ffs package for GNU Emacs on GNU ELPA. Many thanks to Protesilaos for rounds of code review and feedback for improving and polishing the package in preparation for submission to GNU ELPA.
  • bug#81101: Trying to visit https://www.emacswiki.org in EWW I noticed it fails with a Somebody wants you to give them money error due to the anti-bot challenge being served with a HTTP 402 (Payment Required) response. So I landed a patch 12eec781ed6 to no longer do that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Sean Whitton for reviewing and approving my proposed patch.
  • bug#81107: I noticed that in EWW, unlike <input type="submit"> HTML buttons, <button> elements were not tab-stoppable, leading to poorer usability and accessibility. So I landed a patch ec3d662de0b to fix that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Eli Zaretskii for reviewing, providing feedback, and accepting my proposed change.
  • Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua: I joined Sacha for a new episode of her Emacs Chat podcast, where we talked about Emacs and life. I gave a quick tour of my Emacs configuration, discussing at length my configurations for EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) among other topics like Emacs's facility for visually indicating buffer boundaries in the fringe by setting indicate-buffer-boundaries and my convenience configuration macros.
• maintainers@: I started the next long-overdue round of emails to GNU package maintainers to confirm the contact information we have on file for them and get a brief status update about their packages. Emails are sent in small batches to keep the workload of handling the responses manageable for assistant GNUisances.
• GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the May GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team for publication on the FSF's community blog and the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter.

Debian

I've begun the work toward updating the Jami package in Debian unstable again, which means I need to package new releases of its direct and indirect dependencies. For OpenDHT, I need to update RESTinio, and to do that I first need to package expected-lite and sobjectizer for Debian:

• #1120837: ITP: expected-lite expected objects for C++11 and later
• #1137609: ITP: sobjectizer C++ implementation of Actor, Publish-Subscribe, and CSP models

I've been working on packaging both and hope to have them uploaded to the archive in the next days and weeks. That's it for this month's report. Take care, and so long for now.

In the recent weeks I've been engaging Prot as a coach to help review my new ffs package for GNU Emacs as I worked on preparing it for inclusion in GNU ELPA, as well as discussing other Emacs- and life-related topics. UPDATE 2026-05-23 22:39:15 -0400: Prot also published an article about our session on his website: https://protesilaos.com/commentary/2026-05-23-life-issues-and-philosophy-amin-bandali/ In our nearly 2-hour conversation, we discussed at length and in depth various aspects of life in the current times. For instance, feeling overwhelmed in the face of innumerable things happening at once, with technology changing our perception and making events feel proximate and imminent. We talked about seasonality and rhythms in life, including in relation to burnout and knowing our own limitations, and descriptive vs prescriptive thinking when reflecting on the expectations we may place on our self when comparing our self to others through the lens of our necessarily-incomplete impressions and glimpses of their lives. We discussed absence or loss as a dual to presence or persistence in the process of life. How with our memories and through embodying the philosophy and teachings of departed loved ones their essence and legacy continues to live on within us. But also loss in the sense of us losing parts of our self in life-defining moments while preserving other parts and gaining new ones, being liberated of some of the burdens of our past self and in effect becoming someone else in the process. In being true to our self, we talked about humans as multi-faceted beings and the importance of expressing and giving a voice to these different aspects of our self, and keeping alive that child-like sense of awe and wonder. To live a life where the pace and rhythms of our environment are in sync with our internal rhythms, and to not give others undue power over us or our happiness through trying to live according to their prescribed standards or expectations. I also learned more about Prot's practical philosophy of situational awareness in life, not merely as a means for survival, but also as a way of appreciating all of the beauty that surrounds us, and a method for gaining the knowledge and skills to apply what we learn from patterns in one area of life to other areas. We concluded our session with a mention to the concept of sanctity, to set aside a sacred time or place for our self wherein no distractions are allowed, where we can unwind, rest, and recharge for whatever comes next. Here is the video recording of our session, which I share with Prot's permission: You can view or download the full-resolution video from the Internet Archive. Like Prot, I am invigorated and inspired to live a full, honest life. To do my best, do what I do in earnest, and make the best of what I have. Take care, and so long for now.

ffs provides a minor mode for simple plain text presentations in Emacs, where the slides are separated using the page-delimiter, by default the form feed character (^L). I wrote ffs in early 2022 for my LibrePlanet 2022 presentation the Net beyond the Web, and earlier this year decided to polish it towards being a proper package and submit it to GNU ELPA. The manual still needs some more work, but the overall package is in pretty good shape so I submitted for inclusion in GNU ELPA.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): ffs
• Official manual: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs.html
• Change log: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs-changelog.html
• Git repository: https://git.kelar.org/~bandali/ffs
• Backronyms: fabulous foolproof slides - for freedom's sake - ffs flips slides

ffs and I owe a debt of gratitude to Protesilaos for rounds of code review and feedback for improving and polishing the package in preparation for submission to GNU ELPA. You can watch videos of these sessions posted earlier on my website:

• FFS code review with Protesilaos
• FFS code review and Emacs extensibility with Protesilaos

Further, inspiration for parts of ffs's implementation was gratefully drawn from Protesilaos's Logos package for Emacs. Dedicated to the loving memory of Farangis Yousefinia. Below are the release notes.

---

Version 0.2.2 on 2026-05-21

First release of ffs on GNU ELPA. The attempted build of ffs 0.2.1 within GNU ELPA build sandbox failed with an Error: void-function (org-texinfo-kbd-macro) due to use of #+macro: kbd (eval (org-texinfo-kbd-macro $1)) in ffs.org for better formatting of key sequences in the exported Texinfo copy. This seems to have happened for the specific case of generating a plain text README using ox-ascii where ELPA didn't load ox-texinfo. To try and mitigate this, a README.md has been added for use as the package README instead of ffs.org. If not sufficient, a Texinfo copy of the ffs manual will be shipped instead of the Org one in the next release. ffs 0.2.2 also includes small fixes and improvements throughout ffs.el from Stefan Monnier, and additional feedback to be addressed in future releases.

Version 0.2.1 on 2026-05-20

The attempted build of ffs 0.2.0 within GNU ELPA build sandbox failed with a "Cannot include file" error on the "#+include: fdl.org" in the manual. So, as a workaround, we switch to using the official Texinfo copy of the GNU FDL license rather than an Org copy.

Version 0.2.0 on 2026-05-19

First release of ffs intended for GNU ELPA. After a few years of inactivity, in early 2026 I decided to dust off ffs.el, polish and document it, and offer for inclusion in GNU ELPA as a proper package.

Default value of ffs-default-face-height changed to nil

To minimize unexpected and/or unnecessary changes out-of-the-box, the default value of ffs-default-face-height has been changed to nil.

ffs-edit-buffer-name demoted from user option to variable

This is not an important user-facing setting, so to help avoid overwhelming users with many options, this has been demoted from a user option to a variable.

Several new user options for customizing ffs's behaviour

As part of the effort to bring ffs more in line with the conventions of other existing Emacs packages, the mechanisms for toggling various parts of Emacs's interface to minimize visual clutter were changed from being minor modes to being customizable user options. These are the replacement new user options, with a default value of nil:

• ffs-hide-cursor
• ffs-hide-mode-line
• ffs-hide-header-line

Their value is buffer-local, and may be set globally using setq-default. See the sample configuration in the manual for an example of how to customize them. The new ffs-page-delimiter user option defines the page delimiter inserted by ffs-edit-done when inserting a new slide. Emacs's page-delimiter regexp should be able to match ffs-page-delimiter's value, so if you use a custom page-delimiter be sure to customize ffs-page-delimiter accordingly. The new ffs-echo-progress user option controls whether to display in echo area the progress through the slides. When non-nil, changing slides will also display the progress through the slides in the echo area. The format of the displayed progress can be customized using the new ffs-echo-progress-format user option. The new ffs-edit-display-buffer-alist user option may be used to control the Window configuration for the ffs-edit buffer. By default, it will display the ffs-edit buffer in the same window. The new ffs-edit-done-hook user option may be used to define hooks to be run at the end of ffs-edit-done after returning to the main ffs presentation buffer. Lastly, a new ffs-find-speaker-notes-function variable was added to allow customizing the find function used for opening the speaker's notes file, defaulting to find-file-other-frame.

Version 0.1.0 on 2022-05-19

Initial publication of ffs.el as part of my personal configurations for GNU Emacs. My first attempt at this concept was a now-archived ffsanim.el, a major mode implementation that used Emacs's animate library to animate slide texts onto the screen. Shortly after realizing the shortcomings of that approach, I abandoned it in favour a minor mode implementation and published version 0.1.0 of what is now ffs in my personal configs repository. I used this implementation for presenting my LibrePlanet 2022 talk, The Net beyond the Web. I picked "ffs" as the package name, the acronym for form feed slides.

In the recent weeks I've been engaging Prot as an Emacs coach to help with doing review passes over my upcoming ffs package as I work on polishing and documenting it in preparation for offering it for inclusion in GNU ELPA. UPDATE 2026-05-15 08:50:10 -0400: Prot also published an article about our session on his website: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-05-15-emacs-amin-bandali-ffs-display-buffer-org-capture/ Today we had our third session where we started by reviewing and talking about my recent changes to ffs, then ventured to other Emacs-related topics with the overarching theme of the flexibility and extensibility of GNU Emacs, including display-buffer-alist, keyboard macros, defining a custom ox-bhtml Org export backend derived from Org's ox-html for ultimate flexibility when exporting my site's pages from Org to HTML, Org capture, plain text files and Emacs's diary and how it compares to org-agenda, and keeping a journal with the help of Emacs. Here is the video recording of our session, which I share with Prot's permission: You can view or download the full-resolution video from the Internet Archive. Lastly, here is the snippet Prot shared for having Isearch treat space as a wildcard, helpful for more easily matching multiple parts of a line: Take care, and so long for now.

In the recent weeks I've been engaging Prot as an Emacs coach to help with doing review passes over my upcoming ffs package as I work on polishing and documenting it in preparation for offering it for inclusion in GNU ELPA. Yesterday we had our second session focused on ffs, which I recorded and share publicly with everyone with Prot's permission, so that others can also benefit from Prot's insights and experience as we discuss various aspects of Emacs package development with the concrete example of ffs. Here is the video recording of our session: You can view or download the full-resolution video from the Internet Archive. I addressed most of Prot's feedback about ffs from our first session, and I'll be working on the changes we discussed in this session in the next days. In the last third of the video we switched topics to discuss a few Emacs-related tangents including adding a 'padding' effect for the mode line and its constructs, and distilling and separating the easily-reusable package-like parts of one's Emacs configuration from the actual configuration of those parts (e.g. the distinction of prot-lisp and prot-emacs-modules in Prot's Emacs configuration). For mode line padding, here is the snippet I'm using with Prot's doric-themes: Take care, and so long for now.

Yesterday I joined Sacha Chua for a new episode of her Emacs Chat podcast, where we talked about Emacs and life. I gave a quick tour of my Emacs configuration, discussing at length my configurations for EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) among other topics like Emacs's facility for visually indicating buffer boundaries in the fringe by setting indicate-buffer-boundaries and my convenience configuration macros. The above video is provided with closed captions and the below transcript courtesy of Sacha with minor fixes and formatting by me. I've included some of Sacha's screenshots from our chat, you can see the rest on the episode's page on Sacha's blog. A few links from our chat:

• my literate GNU Emacs configuration
  • .emacs.d - configs - My configuration for GNU Emacs and other programs
• personal fork of QMK firmware with my keymaps
  • my custom keymap for ZSA Voyager split ergonomic keyboard
• my upcoming ffs (Form Feed Slides) package for simple presentations

It was a lot of fun - thanks again for having me, Sacha! Take care, and so long for now.

Transcript

For the full transcript please see: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/emacs-chat-202605.html

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Alexandre Detiste (tchet)
• Amin Bandali (bandali)
• Jean-Pierre Giraud (jipege)
• Timthy Pearson (tpearson)

The following contributor was added as Debian Maintainer in the last two months:

• Safir Secerovic

Congratulations!

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Sahil Dhiman (sahil)
• Jakub Ru i ka (jru)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Josenilson Ferreira da Silva
• Ileana Dumitrescu
• Douglas Kosovic
• Israel Galadima
• Timothy Pearson
• Blake Lee
• Vasyl Gello
• Joachim Zobel
• Amin Bandali

Congratulations!